


Mouthful of White Lies

by sequence_fairy



Category: Bleach
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, post-685
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2017-02-19
Packaged: 2018-09-25 14:38:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9824900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sequence_fairy/pseuds/sequence_fairy
Summary: I can’t find you in the body sleeping next to me/what happened to the soul you used to be?





	

**Author's Note:**

> Ichiruki. Angst. Post-TYBW, before 686. Canon-compliant in the worst way. Consider yourselves warned for ichi//hime and implied ren//ruki. Also, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it ishihime.

Fall rushes in on the cold wings of a storm that strips the leaves off the trees and tosses them into soggy piles up against doorways and into the gutters. Ichigo scuffs his feet through the piles on his twice daily walk between the campus and the apartment complex where he lives. It rains in icy gusts that chill him to the bones and make him hunch his shoulders and turn up the collar on his jacket. He walks, hands stuffed into his pockets and head down, earbuds pushed into his ears to discourage any friendly overtures that aren’t already put off by the scowl that darkens his brow and twists his mouth.

Kurosaki Ichigo, substitute _Shinigami_ no more, is twenty-one years old, ginger-haired, and outwardly, completely happy with his life. He’s got a job and an apartment, he’s got papers to write and exams to study for and a girlfriend to dote on, who dotes on him in return, but there’s something missing.  Ichigo has never been the kind of person that spends a lot of time on self-examination, but he is intimately familiar with the shape of the thing that is missing – it is a little under five feet tall, possessing eyes the colour of a twilight sky and is the reason he used to get up in the morning.

Ichigo turns off the sidewalk, and heads into the apartment complex, where his flat waits, dark and cold, to welcome him home. He toes his shoes off at the door, and drops his bag and his keys on the floor next to them. The rain falls in sheets against the windows, and Ichigo flips the blinds closed, preferring not to look out at the sodden city. He hates the rainy season.

He pads through his flat, opens the fridge, decides there’s nothing of worth inside it, closes the fridge, and stands, aimlessly, in the middle of his dark kitchen. He should eat. He should study. He should call Inoue. He should - do a lot of things. Instead, he stands, shoulders slowly hunching forward, in the middle of his kitchen, until the ringing of his phone shatters the silence.

Ichigo startles, and then flings himself towards the entryway and his bag. He fishes his phone out and accepts the call without looking.

“Yo,” he says, and there’s a startled inhale on the other end of the line.

_Ichigo?_

Ichigo responds with his own startled inhale. He hasn’t heard that voice in almost three years. “R–Rukia?”

_Yes, you idiot._ There’s a huff of fond exasperation in her voice and Ichigo smiles despite himself.

“Something I can do for you?”

_Meet me down by the river_ , she says, _I’ve got something to tell you._

“You – you’re here? In Toyko? What?”

_Are you going to meet me or not?_

“It’s pouring rain –”

_So bring an umbrella._

She hangs up without waiting for his answer and Ichigo stares at his phone in the palm of his hand for a long time before tapping out a quick text to Inoue, telling her he got caught up at the lab and that he’ll call her tomorrow night (the lie sits heavy in his stomach, but he can’t possibly tell her the _truth_ ) and then rummages through his closet for the only umbrella he owns.

The rain has abated somewhat by the time he reaches the riverbank. He strolls down the empty path; mind racing as he tries to imagine what she could possibly have to tell him after three years of no contact. They’d agreed that it would be too hard, that they wouldn’t do this – she would go on with her life and he with his, because the gulf that separated them was too wide to cross. She was a spirit being, he was a living human - and he remembers the inflection she’d placed on _human_ , because it was the same one she’d used the last time she’d tried to push him away for his own good.

Last time, he’d been young and foolish and utterly in love with this girl who had come into his life like a thunderclap and was being taken out of it by force. He’d refused to adhere to her direction and had instead taken on the entirety of the _seireitei_ to get her back. This time though, this time, there were no tears in her eyes, there was no trembling bottom lip, there was only her eyes like flint and her voice steady and resigned, and the icy whisper of her _reiatsu_ swirling around his ankles.

She’d left him standing in front of the clinic, and she hadn’t looked back. Belatedly, Ichigo had reached out, his fingers grasping empty air for the sleeves of her _shihakusho_. He doesn’t like to remember the way he’d said her name, but it rings through the memory, the syllables cracked and his voice thready like he’d been winded.

When vehement denial finally gave way to a vicious and spiralling anger, Ichigo stumbled to Urahara’s shop in the middle of the night and pounded on the door until the man himself came to answer. The usual flashfire of his rage then simmered through weeks of intense sparring sessions that left Ichigo battered mentally as well as physically. Urahara had a particular talent for needling Ichigo to just past the brink of his own self-control - far enough that Ichigo would have to wage a battle on two fronts, but never far enough that there was any danger that Ichigo would lose control entirely.

At the end of the anger, there were the increasingly desperate (more like pathetic, he thinks now) requests to Urahara to open the gate, to let him through, to give him the chance to see her one last time. Urahara had steadfastly refused, and Ichigo’s rage had been broken back to an all-consuming melancholy that washed everything out to grey and left him fumbling for normalcy any way that he could find it.

Inoue had been the balm that he’d applied, liberally, to the gaping wound in his chest. She’d done the same thing she’d always done, gentling him like you would a nervous yearling; curling her fingers firmly but loosely around his, letting him drown himself in her skin, and all the while, shoring up the crumbling bits of his soul. They’d fallen together in the quiet way of two people grieving similar but unrelated losses, and Ichigo will be grateful forever for the way Inoue doesn’t push him into anything, for the way she wants him to take it slow, the way she _understands_ him - she knows the whole story (more or less) and sometimes, he thinks, she might know it better than he does.

(He’s never heard the whole of her story, but he knows her and he knows Ishida, and he knows that distance makes things difficult.)

And yet, even now, three years later, he still sometimes dreams about Rukia - the way she laughed, the way her fingers felt, carding through his hair, the way her voice would turn to smoke and embers when they were alone. In the dreams, he no longer has to long for the feel of her skin, for the taste of her on his tongue. The dreams come much less frequently now than they did at the beginning - when the loss was still fresh, and the wound still raw - but now they come as a surprise and leave him gasping awake, his heart racing and his skin tingling with the leftovers of the vision.

When Inoue is there beside him when he wakes up, he pulls her close and buries his nose in the scent of her hair - warm vanilla and soft honey and so different than the cool hint of gardenias that used to follow in Rukia’s wake.

(When she is not, he slides out of bed and out of his skin and flings himself from rooftop to rooftop until he is too exhausted to go any further.)

Ichigo knows Inoue is too good to him, that she deserves better than this, better than _him_ , better than someone who wakes up with someone else’s name in his mouth and the ghostly imprint of their hands on his skin. Inoue deserves someone who loves her for all that she is, not someone who is only capable of loving her with the pieces of themselves that don’t already belong to someone else.

But, he supposes, she only loves him with the pieces of herself that she didn’t give to Ishida, and so, he thinks, they are probably a better match than even they realise.

He rounds a bend in the path, and there she is. She’s in _gigai_ – he can tell because she’s not shimmering under the rainfall - and her hair falls like a river of midnight ink down the back of her yellow coat – the same yellow coat, he’s sure, she was wearing that day they went skating. The very same coat she was wearing the day before she left for seventeen months, the day before his brain caught up with what his soul knew from the moment they met.

She turns before he can get any closer and Ichigo’s steps slow. Her face is the same, though her hair is longer now, and when she lifts a hand in greeting, that too, is the same. Ichigo raises his own hand in return and if his steps quicken now that she’s noticed him, it’s entirely unconscious on his part. He reaches her before he knows it, and it turns out that her eyes are the same as they always were too, and so is the soft curve of her mouth into her barely there smile.

“Rukia,” he says when gets close enough, and she inclines her head. “I thought you were too busy to come down the _gensei_ to visit?” Ichigo tries to keep his voice teasing and light, but does not entirely succeed. His phone vibrates in his pocket, he ignores it.

“I am,” she says, and there’s a catch in her voice that makes Ichigo’s gut roll. She looks down and away and the feeling intensifies. Rukia lets the silence between them drag out a few beats longer than is comfortable before continuing. “I wanted to tell you first,” she says, and Ichigo catches a flash of gold in her hand when she brings her hands together, and wrings her fingers. “Ichigo,” she says, and then she looks up at him.

Ichigo’s breath catches in his throat. Rukia’s eyes flare wide, and there’s a heart-stopping moment where the rest of the city drops away and Ichigo remembers another night on another riverbank. He half expects the fizz-bang of a firework to send colour wheeling into the sky, but the night remains silent and still.

“Why are you here Rukia?” Ichigo asks, ignoring the way his palms have gone clammy. Ichigo’s phone vibrates in his pocket again, this time in the series of buzzes that means it’s a phone call, not a text. He ignores it again.

“Ichigo,” Rukia repeats, and the next words she says are impossible. So utterly impossible that Ichigo asks her to repeat herself. She does. Something gives inside Ichigo’s chest, and his stomach plummets to his feet.

“Are - are you sure?” Ichigo’s voice is hoarse. He clears his throat.

“Yes, of course I’m sure,” Rukia answers. There’s a finality to her words, and Ichigo’s phone buzzes in his pocket again. He wants to throw it into the river. Instead, he grits his teeth and looks down at her again.

“H-how?”

“Well, you see –” Rukia drawls, and Ichigo glares at her. Rukia sighs, and she presses a hand to her stomach, letting her thumb caress the soft swell of her belly under her coat. Ichigo wills his gaze away from her hand, and turns to look out over the water. The low hanging clouds reflect the light pollution from the city and lend an eerie blue glow to the air.

The silence grows and Ichigo itches to fill it. There are words in his mouth that would hurt her, words that would burn this tentative bridge Rukia is offering, and oh, Ichigo wants to say them. He can taste them on his tongue. He can feel them stoppered against his teeth and it takes all his self-control to swallow them down, to clear his throat and turn back to her, to reach out, touch her shoulder and wish her well. He can feel his teeth grinding when he smiles, and Rukia, surprised, smiles back.

“It was nice to see you,” he says, and Rukia nods, and it’s perfunctory, their goodbye, and this time, this time, Ichigo knows he won’t see her again. He turns, and walks away, leaving Rukia in the newly re-started rain - and if there’s a vicious kind of glee that surfaces in the back of his mind at leaving _her_ in the rain, waiting for _him_ , well, he’s only (mostly) human.

He doesn’t feel her leave, but when he turns back just before the path turns, she’s gone.


End file.
